Limit, The by Michael Cannell Page B

who had crashed into a gorge a year earlier, was supposed to be making his own scouting trip. Instead he spent his team’s reconnaissance money at one of Mexico City’s best brothels, an establishment favored by high-ranking politicians.
    Debauches were common among the sport’s European stars, but it was not Hill’s style. He and Ginther had started as mechanics. They were clean-cut American gear heads, not carousers. In the heat of Tuxtla Gutiérrez they focused only on preparations—pumping the right fuel for the altitude, loading spare tires, welding a broken shock absorber.
    They rose at 4 a.m. on the morning of the start, after an hour’s sleep, to adjust the gas level in the carburetor and make final refinements. In the darkness they drove the Ferrari to the starting line, a mile from town, where Hill made a last-minute check under the hood and noticed that their battery was unfastened. The bolts had jarred loose on the drive south. Ginther ran the full mile back into town to look for a battery box and returned empty-handed. Now in a panic, Hill sent Ginther on a second run to town while he tried to strap the battery down with fencing scavenged from a cow pasture. When that failed he found a parked car and tore out the needed parts with seconds to spare before the 6 a.m. start. “Richie comes staggering in all out of breath from his run into town,” Hill said. “I drag him into the cockpit just as the flag falls.”
    They were off, sliding around corners and kicking up a thirty-foot tail of dust. Within minutes they had caught up to the front pack. Hill blasted by them in a single surge.
    Now he was in the lead, running through patches of fog,with Ginther looking out for abrupt turns. “He’d yell ‘LEFT!’ or ‘RIGHT!’ at the last second and I’d get all over the brakes and scramble down three or four gears and we’d just by the grace of God make it around the turn.”
    They held their position until popping two tires. While they replaced them and pounded out a damaged fender, a twenty-five-year-old Italian driver with soft, handsome features named Umberto Maglioli blew by in a powerful new 4.5-liter Ferrari. They overtook him in turn when bumps dislodged Maglioli’s radiator hose. In his rearview mirror Hill could see that Maglioli had painted the name of Quintus Fabius Maximus, a Roman general known for wearing down enemies, on the upper portion of his windshield.
    The bloodshed began less than two hours after the start when a Ferrari driven by Antonio Stagnoli blew a tire at 165 mph and flew 180 feet off the side of the road. The car landed hard, flipped, and burst into flames. The navigator, Giuseppe Scotuzzi, was thrown from the car and died instantly. Stagnoli was taken to an Oaxaca hospital for burn treatment. He died the next morning. Nine more drivers would die before the race ended.
    The death toll at the 1953 Carrera was not confined to the drivers. An hour after Stagnoli crashed, a Ford rolled off the road and landed in a riverbank without injury to its drivers. Spectators gathered for a look, spilling onto the road. Another Ford swerved to avoid a little girl and ran into a roadside banking, where it killed six spectators.
    Hill had by now driven roughly 3,000 miles in Mexico over the course of two years without serious mishap, but his luck would run out the next day when he crested a hill on themountainous leg to Mexico City and began a mean downhill turn to the right. Sliding to the edge, he realized that he did not have enough brake power to stay on the road. “I was mentally considering how far down we’d fall because at our speed we were sure as hell going over,” he said. “Some drops are sheer, down hundreds of feet, and you don’t stand a prayer—and we didn’t know about this one.”
    Hill and Ginther spun perpendicular to the road and slid off the edge backwards, bouncing end-over-end